Dave Zirin | The Nation

Dave Zirin

Gay rights activists hold a banner reading "Homophobia - the religion of bullies" during their action on Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on Sunday, July 14, 2013. (AP Photo/Evgeny Feldman)

There are few people in the sports world I respect more than Cyd Zeigler the founder of the website Outsports, which deals with the sporting lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender athletes. I tweeted Mr. Zeigler’s excellent article titled “Don’t Boycott Olympics Ban Russia From Competing Instead” precisely because it was incisive and made me think. I do however feel that on principle I need to state that I strongly disagree with his central premise.

Zeigler’s argument is that Russia should be treated as a pariah state not unlike South Africa during the time of apartheid, excluded from most major international sporting events.

As he writes, “Think a Russian ban is crazy? There’s precedent for it. In 1964, the IOC [International Olympic Committee] banned South Africa from participating in the Olympic Games because of apartheid in that nation. The ban remained in force for 28 years, until apartheid ended. Let Russia, as host, watch the games from the sidelines as 200 other nations slide across the ice in Sochi.”

I disagree for three main reasons. First and most obviously, such a move would do far more damage to the Russian athletes themselves than to Vladamir Putin. If we are against making the athletes political pawns, as Zeigler has written in an article opposing a US boycott, then we should stay true to that no matter the country. Athletes shouldn’t have to pay the price for being born in a country abysmal on human rights.

Second is the critical question of who gets to initiate such a powerful demand. Inside the apartheid South Africa cited by Zeigler, there was an actual organization called the South African Non-Racialized Olympic Committee (SANROC) that called for its own country’s exclusion. SANROC organizers like Dennis Brutus went to jail or were shot in the name of keeping South Africa out of the Olympics and other international sporting events. Black and brown athletes, even when they were the best on the field, were excluded from South Africa’s teams. We haven’t heard any such a demand from Russia’s LGBT athletes or straight athlete allies. If we did, it would change the calculus of this dramatically.

This leads to the third fallacy in the “expel Russia” argument. Zeigler writes, “Instead of asking athletes, coaches and fans to risk disqualification, arrest or worse in Sochi, Russia this winter, it’s time for the IOC itself to take a stand.”

The IOC couldn’t “take a stand” with two crutches and hydraulic lift. It was a flawed body during the Cold War. Now it’s a corporate piranha masquerading as Nemo the Clown Fish, tearing countries to pieces under a miasma of soft-headed hooey about “bringing the world together through sports.” Asking the IOC to be an ally in the fight against oppression is like asking a scorpion not to sting. The mere fact that the Winter Games are in Putin’s Sochi—where the disappearance of $30 billion in Olympic construction costs has elicited barely a pip from the IOC—only shows who they are and where they stand.

This connects to the last and most serious problem with Zeigler’s argument. Having forces in the United States and the West—or in the case of the IOC, largely controlled by the United States and the West—telling Russia it can’t compete immediately raises a series of thorny questions. Russia’s anti-gay laws are abhorrent. You know what else is abhorrent? The drone and spying programs of the United States. Also our deeply racist system of mass incarceration, our treatment of women prisoners, our continued degradation of indigenous people, our record-setting immigrant deportation program or the fact that in twenty-nine states it’s still legal to fire people just because of their sexuality.

The list goes on. This isn’t about comparing and contrasting the crimes of East and West. It’s about saying that if the only countries allowed in the Olympics had sparkling records on human rights, we’d be watching polar bears race penguins on an ice drift in Antarctica.

The answer in this case lies with what Zeigler dismisses: “asking athletes, coaches and fans to risk disqualification, arrest or worse in Sochi, Russia.” Yes it’s a lot to ask. It was also a lot to ask of Dennis Brutus when he was shot organizing SANROC. It was a lot to ask John Carlos and Tommie Smith to raise their fists for human rights in 1968. Fighting injustice actually demands having a fight. The IOC won’t do it for us. If you stand for LGBT rights, then you need to stand up, pick a side, throw on your rainbow colored gloves, and start fighting. In the end, the story of Sochi will either be the celebration of repression or resistance. The time to organize resistance begins now, with no illusions in the IOC, their corporate sponsors, or the good will of our own government.

Sometimes it’s all just too damn much. First came word this week that the famed Coney Island statue of Jackie Robinson, standing alongside Pee Wee Reese as sporting symbols of racial progress, had been defaced, with “die n***ers,” “f*ck Jackie Robinson and all n***ers,” and “Heil Hitler” scrawled across it. It’s quite the capstone to a summer that started with the sweetly hopeful biopic, 42, about Robinson’s early career and post-racial promise. There is no doubt if Robinson still walked among us, he wouldn’t be shocked at the vandalism of his statue. He’d grit his teeth and set to cleaning it with his bare hands as a vein throbbed dangerously on his temple. This is the world—and the country—Jackie Robinson knew all too well.

The vandalizing of the Jackie Robinson/Pee Wee Reese monument comes days after Riley Cooper, a middling Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver, was caught on a cellphone camera angrily yelping that he was going to “fight every n***er” after a (black) security guard wouldn’t let him backstage at a Kenny Chesney concert. Cooper has since gone on a tearful apology tour. Tim Tebow—his former college teammate—has pledged to “pray for him” and the Eagles want him to go through mandated sensitivity training as he strains to keep his job.

There is no connection between Jackie Robinson and Riley Cooper’s scramble to stay employed, except for the ones seen—somehow—by some of the deep thinkers on sports radio. Several sports radio commentators compared Cooper and his post-slur pariah status with Robinson’s lonely isolation when he joined the Majors in 1947. They implored Eagles quarterback Michael Vick to give us a “Pee Wee Reese moment” of reconciliation and put his arm around Riley Cooper’s shoulders in front of the world. “We need to build bridges and stop the divisions,” they said. (I apologize for the lack of links but I was driving at the time. I was just glad to get home without crashing.) This is almost too stupid for words, but I’ll leave it at this: the only way Jackie Robinson and Riley Cooper should ever be in the same sentence is if you say, “If Jackie Robinson was alive, I bet he stares a hole through Riley Cooper.”

Then there is Miami Heat player Dwyane Wade and his commitment to keep talking about the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Wade appeared this week on the cover of Ebony with his sons in hoodies and continues to insist upon using his fame to prevent Trayvon from falling down the media memory hole. Wade was someone who tweeted after George Zimmerman was found innocent of Trayvon’s murder in July, “Wow!!! Stunned!!! Saddened as a father!!! Some1 make sense of this verdict for me right now please!!! Don’t worry I’ll wait…”

Now, Wade’s magazine cover with his two sons was a visual reminder of what he said when Trayvon was killed last year: “This situation hit home for me because last Christmas, all my oldest son wanted as a gift was hoodies. So when I heard about this a week ago, I thought of my sons.”

In the aftermath, Tea Party message boards have talked about boycotting the Miami Heat. This is part of their broader plan to boycott Ebony. As the magazine tweeted archly in response, “We have so many Tea Party readers and followers. To lose all zero of them due to our September cover would be devastating.” This led to the twitter hashtag #WhitePeopleBoycottingEbony, which is recommended for anyone who prefers laughing to crying.

Yes, I know there are those reading this who will see three separate events that tell three separate stories. To me they tell the same story. Sports are no post-racial oasis for the simple reason that it is a central part of the cultural life of this country. It reflects this summer of racial anguish. It’s also become the arena where masses of angry young men on message boards, on Twitter and even on statues choose to puke their barbarism.

They vandalized a statue of the man the Hollywood Dream Factory told us was a pioneer of a post-racist future. I wish Hollywood instead told the story of the Robinson who said, “I cannot stand and sing the [national] anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white man’s world.” That’s not just a bitter truth about how Robinson was seeing this country in the years before his death. It’s a starting point for understanding how far we have to go and the seriousness of the fight ahead.

In all likelihood, you are feeling bloated by all-things A-Rod. Maybe you’re repulsed by the person and what you feel he’s done to baseball. Perhaps you’re just sick of the 24/7 media swarm over what a ballplayer may or not have ingested. Or possibly you’re just amused by the entire spectacle, a particular highlight of which occurred when A-Rod described his pending suspension as “the pink elephant in the room.”

But the A-Rod focus obscures what’s revealed by the bigger Biogenesis scandal. Gander at the names of everyone suspended.

Once we are past Braun, each and every one of these players comes out of baseball’s notorious Latin American pipeline (or notorious for anyone who bothers to investigate).

Almost all the suspended players are from the Dominican Republic. This isn’t coincidence or happenstance. It’s the set-up of our globalized national pastime in the twenty-first century.

Any serious discussion about performance-enhancing drugs and baseball needs to deal with the fact of who is getting caught. Major League owners choose to invest billions of dollars in Latin America to develop talent on the cheap in the school’s baseball academies. In the Dominican Republic, where 40 percent of the country lives below the poverty line, steroids are actually legal and available over the counter.

As Gregg Sarra reported for Newsday in 2009, “Here’s how easy it is to buy anabolic steroids in the Dominican Republic: Walk into the local pharmacy and ask for them.”

Human growth hormones are also available but you need a prescription.

Children get scouted before their tenth birthday, are signed to contracts for peanuts, and their families see baseball—not without reason—as the best shot to escape poverty. The incentive to use steroids weighs on the tweens charged with dragging their families out of poverty. According to my own interviews with major-leaguers who’ve injected their bodies with banned substances, they’re psychologically—if not physically—profoundly addictive.

Look at one of the most prominent people branded with the scarlet “S”, Sammy Sosa. Before his thirteenth birthday, he stitched soles in a shoe factory for, as he remembered, “pennies, just enough to survive.” His choices, as he said, were the cane fields, the army or baseball.

Baseball’s owners prey on this reality. They want to benefit from steroids in the development of talent, and then excoriate those same players when caught on US shores. It’s a context that speaks to the imperial arrogance at the heart of the game. It’s a context right in front of our faces that we are asked not to see. Put simply, MLB owners want to have their anabolic cake and eat it too.

It’s also worth noting that many white, college-educated, US-born players have been front and center speaking about why they oppose steroids in the game, leading one of the main media storylines: that “the players are demanding more testing and harsher penalties.” Perhaps. But it would be nice to hear just one US born player say that maybe—just maybe—the context and reality of a lot of the people getting pinched is profoundly different than their own.

Dave Zirin asks why the baseball players union is refusing to go to bat for their own.

I think in labor management relations there is no such thing as standing still. You either move forward or you go back.… The labor movement never stands still. —Marvin Miller, executive director of the Major League Baseball Player’s Association, 1966–1982

The hammer has finally come down. Alex Rodriguez—the latest “poster child” of performance enhancing drug–use in Major League Baseball—will, according to ESPN, be suspended for the entire 2013–14 season. That will end up being a $34 million dollar fine for the highest-paid player in the game.

Let’s forget for a moment that A-Rod will potentially take a bigger hit for “cheating” than Goldman-Sachs, and focus on the baseball issues at play. Rodriguez has said he plans on appealing the suspension. If he does, however, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig has given word that he will invoke the rarely used “best interests of the game” clause in the collective bargaining agreement, and not allow the Yankee third baseman to take the field while on appeal. MLB would take this extraordinary step because it believes A-Rod’s transgressions fit the punishment. They are telling reporters they have evidence that not only was A-Rod a customer of Biogenesis, the shady anti-aging/steroid clinic in South Florida at the heart of this investigation, he also recruited players for Biogenesis and attempted to buy evidence from its owner, Anthony Bosch, now a fully cooperating MLB witness.

There are few people who will shed any tears for Alex Rodriguez. Unlike Barry Bonds, the last “poster-child” for PED use flambéed by Major League Baseball and its media minions, A-Rod has no one—other than those on his payroll—standing in his corner. He has no fierce fan base, as Bonds had in San Francisco. He doesn’t have any teammates he considers to be close friends. He lacks any sort of intriguing anti-hero appeal. As his biographer Selena Roberts said, “He’s known as the Hollowman.” From photos like these, to the painting of himself over his bed as a centaur, his public persona is that of the worst kind of narcissist: the insecure “mean girl” so yearning for approval, she ends up cruelly flaunting her narcissism. He’s the male version of Charlize Theron’s character in Young Adult. It’s not an archetype that ages well.

A-Rod’s lack of support however is exactly what makes him such low-hanging fruit for Bud Selig. And that’s precisely why the Major League Baseball Players Association needs to be fighting his suspension tooth and nail. Unions are not supposed to be fan clubs. They are not organizations of the righteous, the pure or the politically pitch-perfect. If they are to be worth a damn, in baseball or anywhere, they need to be the broadest of broad churches: institutions that will defend their most loathsome members because they understand that “an injury to one is an injury to all” is more than a slogan on a T-shirt. If a player can no longer take the field when appealing a suspension, that also disempowers the entire point of an appeal’s process; and if Bud Selig can get away with invoking the “best interests of the game” clause on A-Rod, then a precedent has been set and no one is safe.

It’s times like this, Michael Weiner, the executive director of the MLBPA, needs to be asking himself, “What would Marvin do?” What actions would the late Marvin Miller, the man who built the MLBPA as a combative fighting union, undertake? Miller’s starting point would be, I believe, to mercilessly call out the hypocrisy of Bud Selig’s case against A-Rod. He would say, as Dan Dickey (@hoopsnerd) pointed out on Twitter, that there is something bizarre about a situation where “MLB paid a drug dealer for his info [and] then considered a lifetime ban for ARod for trying to pay a drug dealer for his info.” He would also remark upon how utterly rich it is for Bud Selig to be lecturing anyone about “the best interests of the game” when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs. He would wonder why the commissioner who was in charge as fully loaded syringes were passed around like party favors in locker rooms in the 1990s is now trusted to “clean up the game”. He would ask why there are no team penalties for steroid use. He would acidly question why owners aren’t fined or sanctioned if their clubhouses become PED clinics. He would wonder why the profits from baseball’s steroid era flow to ownership but the penalties fall upon the players.

Miller wasn’t an anti-PED zealot. When asked for his views in 2009, he said that he thought baseball and Congress’s concerns about steroids were really an “anti-union witch hunt.” He said he didn’t believe greatness on the field could come from “a magic pill.” He said he wouldn’t have supported increased drug testing even if it was demanded by players because “a leadership can’t just take a poll on what membership wants. You also have to judge whether this is in the best interests of the people you represent.” As for congressional intervention, he pointed out that a government which gives subsidies to big tobacco but criminalizes steroids was a government whose moral compass was not to be trusted. Maybe he would have changed his views under the weight of the collective pressure from Congress, the media and even a large constituency of players. But he also would have known where to draw the line.

Marvin Miller—I have no doubt in my mind—would find Alex Rodriguez to be personally loathsome. Miller stood with the underdog. He would see A-Rod’s actions, his business interests and his politics to be the antithesis of the principles to which he devoted his life. But he also believed that the chain always breaks at its weakest link. Alex Rodriguez is—by any measure—the weakest link, and that’s exactly why he’d get Marvin Miller’s most fierce support. The union, in that tradition, should grit its teeth and stand with A-Rod.

Dave Zirin writes about how Ryan Braun made history by confronting MLB.

No two people could conceivably be more different than Johnny Manziel and Trayvon Martin. But despite the chasms that separate them of race, class, fame and, of course, the very gift of life, they’re united in cruel irony. They’re united in the ways this country seems to take a particularly savage joy in eating its young. We don’t treasure our youth. We criminalize them. We exploit them. We deify them. And then we dispose of them. Each young man has a narrative that tells this story.

Manziel, the Texas A&M quarterback, became at age 19 the first freshman college football player in history to win the Heisman Trophy. Trayvon Martin at age 17 was stalked and killed by George Zimmerman for being one of those “punks” and having the misfortune of walking in his deadly line of vision. Johnny Manziel has every twenty-first-century privilege to an almost comical degree. He’s a young, white quarterback in Texas who hails from a wealthy oil family. Think about that quintet: fame, money, youth, whiteness and football. In this culture, that amounts to royalty. Tom Wolfe wouldn’t have the stones to create such a satirical archetype. Trayvon Martin had none of these things, other than his youth, and ended up dead as a result.

And yet, while their differences say a great deal about this country, their sole similarity, symbolized by that shared love of Skittles, tells a story all its own. For those who haven’t been following the Johnny Manziel off-season soap opera—recounted brilliantly in Wright Thompson’s detailed piece in ESPN the Magazine—the young man with everything seems to be losing his grip one inebriated tantrum at a time. He’s being torn to bits by the media for basically being an all-too-typical over-privileged 20-year-old. He gets drunk. He gets in bar fights. He has a temper. He gets arrested. Being wealthy and white provides space for Manziel to be all these things without ending up like Oscar Grant. But being a typical over-privileged 20-year-old and a college football cash cow has created an entirely different set of pressures.

Johnny Manziel’s family believes that Texas A&M and the NCAA are exploiting the hell out of their kid, squeezing every last dime out of him while taking no care to make sure that he’s protected and safe. Everyone wants a piece of their son, because they think he’s a walking piggy bank and if they have to break him to get the change out, then so be it. Johnny Manziel, maybe because he never wanted for anything and doesn’t need the NFL to pull his family out of poverty, is in open chaotic rebellion against everyone’s desire to take a piece of his hide. But no one—particularly in the media—likes a star quarterback with an attitude. Now the person who would typically be a campus god has far more enemies than friends. The Texas A&M student paper said he should leave as soon as possible, with the headline “Johnny, Be Gone.” Someone even keyed his car on campus. His father, in particular, doesn’t understand why people can’t just leave his son alone, saying a line which may go down in infamy: “He ate Skittles, drank beer and won the Heisman.”

Trayvon Martin also ate Skittles but his drink of choice on the night of his death wasn’t beer but Arizona Ice Tea. None of that mattered. The Zimmerman trial became “the Trayvon trial” as his youth was put under the ugliest possible microscope. Think about the strategy of the Zimmerman legal team in defending their client’s right to “stand his ground” and shoot to kill. They put every aspect of a typical teen’s growing pains up for public consumption and scorn. Trayvon’s social media posturing, his shirtless photos, his style of dress were all presented as reasons why he should have been perceived as a threat. They subjected him to a level of scrutiny that frankly few of us would have survived at a similar age. It was an obscenity to see a dead teenager—unable to defend himself—put on trial for the grand purpose of keeping his killer out of prison.

What’s happening to Johnny Manziel is profoundly less serious, but the canyon-sized differences also shouldn’t blind us to that one similarity they share. We live in a culture that reveres, worships and commercializes youth, while simultaneously being a country that eats its young. Johnny Manziel is being eaten figuratively. Trayvon Martin was destroyed literally. How much better the world would be if we could see young people as a resource to build a better world instead of as the projection of our own worst fears and instincts. Then maybe Johnny Manziel just plays football and the media find something more useful to fret over than a 20-year-old’s Instagram account. Then maybe George Zimmerman drives up to Trayvon Martin in the rain, and offers him a ride home.

Yes, the very week Michigan Governor Rick Snyder granted a state-appointed emergency manager’s request to declare the Motor City bankrupt, the Tea Party governor gave a big thumbs-up to a plan for a new $650 million Detroit Red Wings hockey arena. Almost half of that $650 million will be paid with public funds.

This is actually happening. City services are being cut to the bone. Fighting fires, emergency medical care and trash collection are now precarious operations. Retired municipal workers will have their $19,000 in annual pensions dramatically slashed. Even the artwork in the city art museum will be sold off piece by piece. This will include a mural by the great radical artist Diego Rivera that’s a celebration of what the auto industry would look like in a socialist future. As Stephen Colbert said, the leading bidder will be “the museum of irony.”

They don’t have money to keep the art on the walls. They do have $283 million to subsidize a new arena for Red Wings owner and founder of America’s worst pizza-pizza chain, Little Caesar’s, Mike Ilitch, whose family is worth $2.7 billion dollars. (“Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your pensions!”)

How did Governor Snyder possibly summon the shamelessness to justify this?

Here’s how. He said, “This is part of investing in Detroit’s future, That’s the message we need to get across.… As we stabilize the city government’s finances, as we address those issues and improve services, Detroit moves from a place where people might have had a negative impression…to being a place that will be recognized across the world as a place of great value and a place to invest.”

Where, oh where have we heard this argument before? What city has heard the false promise that stadium construction on the public dime would be a postindustrial life raft? There are actually many, but none have heard it more and paid the cost quite like Detroit. A new Red Wings arena would be the city’s third publicly funded major sports stadium, joining the Tigers’ Comerica Stadium and the Lions’ Ford Field. Each of these was billed as a “remedy” to save the city. Each of these has obviously failed. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us. Try to fool us three times? Go to hell.

I spoke with Marvin Surkin, co-author of the classic book Detroit I Do Mind Dying. He said, “These are more than just remedies that didn’t work. They are part of the problem because stadiums don’t address the central issues of falling population, falling tax base, declining wages, unemployment and the underfunding of schools.”

Surkin is correct. If anything, this kind of corporate welfare has over the last generation exacerbated Detroit’s existing problems. Why? Because it siphons money out of the city services—things like schools and hospitals—while creating the very kinds of jobs that are the antithesis to those that once built Detroit into the third-largest city in the United States. No living wages. No job security. No tax base. Just spanking new stadiums for suburban sports fans, which Detroit residents will be able to enter only if they’re selling foam novelty fingers.

As Neal DeMause, who runs the indispensable website Field of Schemes, said to me:

“There’s absolutely no reason on earth that the state of Michigan couldn’t say to Mike Ilitch, ‘Sorry, Detroit has more important things to do with its money.’ Instead, though, the governor seems content to let Ilitch cut to the front of the line for public funds, on the grounds that ‘who doesn’t get fired up’ about hockey. Even if you limited it to economic development projects, putting money into fixing city schools or restoring streetlights would do far more for Detroit’s business prospects than a hockey arena. This just goes to show the problem with carving out shares of tax revenue to go to development authorities—they end up basically serving as slush funds for developers, even when the city treasury is otherwise empty.”

There is a right-wing narrative about Detroit that the city is in peril because of some combination of the 1967 “race riots” and greedy unions. The reality is that black and brown residents of Detroit made Motown and those “greedy unions” built a stable working class that could realistically dream of a better life for their own children. The breaking of Detroit should be seen, in the words of David Sirota, as an indictment of right wing economic orthodoxy. Instead, the bankruptcy has been used as a warning to other cities that unions, pensions and a culture of resistance are roads to ruin.

With this Red Wings arena, Snyder, Ilitch, and their ilk may have gone too far. The commitment of Detroit’s corporate masters to this stadium project actually acts like an autopsy, revealing who has really destroyed the Motor City. As legendary Detroit activist Grace Lee Boggs put it, a conservative agenda has “been strip mining cities by privatizing almost all services, attacking public workers and their unions, while at the same time providing billion-dollar tax cuts for large businesses and cutting revenue sharing to the cities.” In a city that’s 83 percent African-American and built on union labor, it’s a pelt long desired by the Snyders of this world. Neoliberalism has destroyed Detroit. Free trade deals have destroyed Detroit. Corporate welfare has destroyed Detroit. It’s perverse of Snyder and Detroit’s anti-union, pro-stadium mayor—and NBA hall-of-famer—Dave Bing to see stadiums as symbols of Detroit’s revival. They are symbols instead of its decline.

More and more people across the world are getting wise to these kinds of priorities. Perhaps Detroit should keep its eyes on Brazil, where mass discontent with the quality of schools, hospitals and the government led to marches on stadiums built or refurbished for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. One of the slogans amongst the Brazilian masses was “A giant awakes. Come to the streets.” In Detroit, if no one can afford to go to the game they might have no choice but to come to the streets.

Are Governor Rick Snyder’s actions in Detroit an “affront to democracy” or merely tough but necessary decisions?

Call it football’s worst idea since helmets without face guards and the ten-dollar beer. In the wake of the murder charges levied against former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, there is talk that NFL teams may hire “police tattoo experts” to examine the body ink on NFL players for gang affiliations. CBS Sports columnist Bruce Feldman reported that yes, this is actually being considered. As Feldman tweeted, “Spoke w longtime NFL personnel man who said in wake of Aaron Hernandez teams may use police experts to check prospects tattoos”. (Hernandez, as has been widely reported, had the word “blood” tattooed on his hand, a reference some say to the Bristol Bloods gang, although Hernandez denies any gang involvement. This photograph of a teen-age Hernandez was also unearthed, although he looks more like he’s posing for a Halloween party than a night of gang activity.)

Let’s leave aside the attendant irony of the NFL with all its concussions, compromised medical professionals and sea of shattered bodies, being concerned about any culture of violence that surrounds their game. Hiring police tattoo “experts” rests on the assumption that NFL locker rooms are riddled with gangs. This assumption, in league that’s 70 percent African-American, is the very definition of racist. Why? Because there is no evidence whatsoever to support this. According to the FBI’s statistics, an NFL player is five times less likely to run afoul of the law than your typical 22- or 34-year-old. Such an inspection process would merely act as the collective criminalization and intimidation of people who are supposed to be your employees, and do—even in America—have rights on the job as workers.

This is not a league of gang members. It is, however, a league that sells a highly commodified three-hour package of violence for a family audience. Yes, sometimes the violence spills off the field. But this has far less to do with the gangs in a player’s past than the weekly violence that defines their present. When there is off-the-field violence, it’s tragically far more likely to find expression in violence against women than in the highly sensationalized world of gangs. If the NFL wants to look at the roots of off-the-field violence and take the issue of violence against women seriously, then we should listen. If it wants to propagate the idea that tattoos signify violence and gangs, then we should reject this as stereotypical trash.

Should Roger Goodell and friends really want to know why so many players get tats, then they should listen to the words of perhaps the most tattooed player in the NFL, who also happens to have the league’s best-selling jersey: San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

To me, tattoos are a way of people being able to express themselves and have other people look at them and get a little insight into who they are, without ever even saying a word to them. All my tattoos, they’ve been thought out, thought over, been a work in progress for at least a year before I’ve got them. So I’m not walking into a tattoo shop, picking tattoos off a wall. It’s something that means something to me. It’s something that I believe in.

The NFL is known as the “no-fun league” for a reason. Players get tattoos because in a league where you can get fined for having the wrong color of shoelaces, it’s the one way they can show their individuality and be more than a uniform and a helmet. The NFL doesn’t want us to know who’s under the helmet because you don’t want to market a league around players if your next play could be your last. Maybe if the NFL weren’t so callous about dehumanizing their product, players wouldn’t turn to ink to remind everyone that they are human.

Yes, after more than a year of vociferous denials, 2011 National League MVP Ryan Braun has basically admitted to performance-enhancing drug use and been suspended for the remainder of the 2013 season.* For those unfamiliar with the story, Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig had yearned to suspend Ryan Braun for over a year ever since he beat a league suspension after an independent arbitrator deemed that his “sample,” which tested for highly elevated testosterone, was mishandled in transit. (I only wish Grantland Rice was alive so he could wax poetic about the odyssey of Bud Selig’s epic triumph over Ryan Braun and his magical urine.)

Braun finally decided to cut a deal after he was listed as one of more than two dozen players who received “treatments” at the Biogenesis “anti-aging” clinic, run by non-doctor Anthony Bosch. Rather than wait for a suspension, amidst a disappointing injury-plagued season, Braun said no mas. He also didn’t put up a fight because perhaps the best fighting union in the country wouldn’t put up their gloves.

There is a new reality that pits the MLBPA and the owners against those on the field who are tainted by accusations of PED use. Players can now be suspended even if they don’t fail a drug test, and carrying the mere appearance of impropriety now carries the Orwellian stigma of being guilty of a “non-analytical positive.” The MLBPA signaled last week that it wouldn’t be defending players who face evidence of associations with steroid clinics, even if the evidence wouldn’t last in an actual court of law. As MLBPA President Michael Weiner said when Braun announced he would accept the suspension, “I am deeply gratified to see Ryan taking this bold step. It vindicates the rights of all players under the Joint Drug Program. It is good for the game that Ryan will return soon to continue his great work both on and off the field.” In other words, this is the new normal. The burden of proof is now on players to prove they’re innocent and no longer would the union invest political and public relations capital in defending those branded cheaters at the expense of players living “clean.”

There are certainly many who will cheer this development. Just don’t count me among them. My problem with the Braun case is that far too many people are applauding the union by setting up a false dichotomy: either the MLBPA will defend the small percentage of players who are found to be using PEDs, or it will disavow those found to be using and say that the role of the union is to help “clean up the game.” This is, frankly, twisted.

The role of the baseball union, as forged by the late, great Marvin Miller, should be to safeguard the health of its players and entitle them to due process. Let Major League Baseball worry about public relations and kissing Congress’s behind so they can keep their anti-trust exemptions. That’s not a union’s job. When it comes to health, they should be fighting for expanded knowledge and education about what players put into their bodies. They should agitate for players to be able to use safe medical technology and incorporate it, as it develops, into a training regimen that makes player’s lives less perilous. They should also be fighting for accountability by ownership in baseball’s drug culture: constantly raising the question, “What do owners know about PED use on their teams?” They won’t win these battles, but that should be what’s raised from their bully pulpit. The current system only empowers shady—and medically dangerous—facilities like Biogenesis and individuals like Anthony Bosch. The union should also be fighting for due process and a system where the burden of proof is on the accuser and not the accused. Once again, it might not win these fights, but they get to the heart of what a union should actually be doing. As for Ryan Braun, he will go down as the first person sucked into the whirlpool of baseball’s sea change. If the union can’t throw a life preserver, it seems they could have done better than help throw him overboard.

* No, Ryan Braun is not Major League Baseball’s version of Lance Armstrong. ESPN’s Buster Olney —and legions of others online—are comparing the Brewers slugger with the disgraced cyclist since, like Armstrong, Ryan Braun preceded his admittance of guilt with profoundly passionate statements of innocence. But Ryan Braun never tried to financially ruin any of the people who accused him. Ryan Braun never brought frivolous lawsuits or bullied fellow teammates into using in order to make them complicit. To use a labor parallel, Lance Armstrong was thuggish management and Ryan Braun is yet another worker caught up in the web of baseball’s steroid agonistes.

Justice For Trayvon Martin Rally in front of US District Court, Washington DC on Saturday afternoon, 20 July 2013. (Courtesy of FLickr user Elvert Barnes)

There’s “hot”. There’s “summer in DC hot”. And then there’s “summer in downtown DC hot”. For the uninitiated, our humid nation’s capital, built appropriately on a swamp, is particularly sweltering amidst the federal buildings where concrete is king and trees are in scarce supply. This was the setting for Saturday’s vigil for Trayvon Martin, called by the National Action Network and held at the DC Federal Courthouse.

There must have been 1,000 people out on the scorching sidewalk, the overwhelming majority African-American families. [Given the widely publicized nature of the event, it was deeply disappointing that more white members of the DC left—people who organized around Occupy DC or march without fail around other issues—did not attend.]

Most of the signs were home-made; some so touching you’d feel a tear mix with the sweat on your cheeks. The one that grabbed me was a woman who wrote down the entirety of her version of “the talk” she was going to have with her 6-year-old son, who was holding her hand. For those who don’t know, “the talk” is what African-American families tell their sons to avoid racial violence. Normally, it centers on speaking softly and not making sudden movements. But as she said to me, “This is a different kind of ‘talk’ ”. It read:

I will teach my son strength. I will teach my son to question authority. I will teach my son to fight injustice. I will not teach my son to fear. I will not emasculate my son because of uncivilized animals pretending to be human. You teach your son to let my son be, to not hate him because of his skin color because I am teaching my son to die fighting.

The speakers ranged from the National Action Network and the NAACP to local icons like Joe Madison and Dick Gregory. Joe Madison provided a high point when he said, “We still have a Jim Crow legal system. But now it’s a legal system that’s decided the George Zimmermans of the world can be judge, jury and executioner. He then is backed not by Jim Crow. But by James Crow, Esquire.” Dick Gregory provided a low point by starting his speech with a homophobic “joke,” saying it was easy to get gay marriage because of who founded the country. “Just look at George Washington in those tight pants, boots and powdered wig,” he said, waiting for a laugh. The crowd, however, which was energized and clapping at every line from every speaker, was tepid* in response. Homophobia did not sell.

It’s also worth noting that President Obama’s unscheduled, impromptu words yesterday about the Zimmerman verdict were roundly celebrated. Everyone I talked to on the ground seemed to gain confidence and joy from the fact that the president spoke out, and particularly from the part where he said, “Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago,” and when he asked the question, “If Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?”

But there was also a different negative kind impact that President Obama’s words had upon the proceedings. The president signaled Friday that there probably would not be civil rights charges forthcoming from the Department of Justice saying, “Traditionally, these are issues of state and local government…. And law enforcement has traditionally done it at the state and local levels, not at the federal levels.”

This reflected itself in the speeches where no one—to my ears—made direct demands of Eric Holder and the DOJ. Additionally, we were only less than half a mile from the DOJ and there was no consideration of marching over. Would there have been had President Obama not spoken on Friday? No one knows, but I’m inclined to think so.

The most positive part of the gathering however was that there was tremendous energy around the August 24th DC demonstration to commemorate the fifieth anniversary of the March on Washington. The uproar around Trayvon’s case has, I believe, transformed that from a low-key gathering of remembrance into a vital call for a new civil rights movement. People were eager to come back out in August, many even volunteering on the spot to hand out flyers or take home handbills about the coming march.

In the last 15 minutes before it ended, my own 5-year-old son played at the margins of the gathering with a little boy named Martin. As people started to stream away, his mother came over and when my son said, “Goodbye Martin,” his mother said, “I’m so sorry. His name is Kimonte. He’s been telling everyone his name is Martin because of all the people saying, ‘I am Trayvon Martin.’” I said I thought maybe he was named after Martin Luther King. She said, “Well, we need both their spirits arm-in-arm.” Their memories will come together on August 24. I hope to see you there.

* In my original draft, I described the reaction to Gregory as "silent", which it was in my section. After watching the video, sent courtesy of someone on twitter, "tepid" is a better word choice.

“I’m LeBron James from Akron, Ohio, from the inner city. I’m not supposed to be here.… I AIN’T GOT NO WORRIES!”

I want to know what LeBron James thinks about the not-guilty verdict that freed Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. Is that fair? Is it fair to yearn for a political response on a polarizing and painful issue from someone who puts a ball through a hoop for a living? My friend Mike Freeman over at CBS Sports said to me, “I’d rather hear more from President Obama about this than LeBron.” That’s a very good point. But I’ll also maintain that we have every right to expect a comment on this Florida travesty from Florida’s most famous resident. This isn’t like waiting for Tiger Woods, Peyton Manning or Mariano Rivera to enlighten us with their thoughts about the fact that George Zimmerman somehow walked. LeBron James is different because he made himself different.

In 2012, LeBron James famously organized the entire Heat squad across all geographical and demographic lines to wear hoodies for Trayvon, their heads bowed in protest. LeBron himself wrote “Trayvon RIP” on his sneakers, and his teammate Dwyane Wade did the same with the message We Want Justice. Given that James was a man with legions of haters, without a ring and still smarting from the Heat’s loss in the 2011 championship against the Dallas Mavericks, taking time out for a highly charged political stance held more than a little risk. But LeBron didn’t care and his sense that Trayvon mattered more than his “brand” truly meant something. After the photo was taken, Trayvon’s father Tracy said, “These athletes are saying, ‘It’s not about who I am. It’s about right and wrong…. The Miami Heat came out in their hoodies, and that’s just saying, ‘We are people, we have hearts, we have feelings, we have emotions.’ That’s a warm feeling.”

Now, just seventeen months later, James is athletically and culturally in a different stratosphere. The Heat have won two titles. He has hit every shot, answered every question and silenced every hater. He has 9.1 million Twitter followers and is perhaps the world’s most important athlete. He was even feeling secure enough in Game Six of the 2013 finals to toss off his headband and show the world his hairline. Then after their Game Seven triumph, he loosened up on the trophy stand and said the words that that made my friend Kevin (his words) “burst with a black working man’s pride,” saying, “I’m LeBron James from Akron, Ohio, from the inner city. I’m not supposed to be here.… I AIN’T GOT NO WORRIES!”

Well, now we have worries. LeBron: You have more cultural capital that anyone in the state of Florida. You have already made clear that you care deeply about what happened that rainy night when a teenager went out for Skittles and ended up dead. You identified with the anger people feel toward a criminal justice system that saw Trayvon Martin as disposable perhaps precisely because you were someone who wasn’t “even supposed to be here.”

You once said that your dream was to be “a global icon like Muhammad Ali.” That takes a hell of a lot more than just titles. It takes a certain dogged persistence on questions many simply don’t want asked. As Ali once said, “I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin’ hell, but as long as they ain’t free, I ain’t free.” Freedom still eludes far too many. When the verdict came down, your teammate Dwyane Wade said, ““Wow!!! Stunned!!! Saddened as a father!!! Some1 make sense of this verdict for me right now please!!! Don’t worry I’ll wait…” You’ve still said nothing. Anything would mean something. Even simple words of support and prayer for the Martin family would matter. I’m glad you have no worries. But the worries are knocking at your door.

Let’s be honest: no one is waiting for what Michael Jordan has to say about this case. But you showed last year that you’re not him. You showed, as Tracy Martin said, that you “have a heart.” I can’t help think about those three simple words D-Wade wrote on his sneakers: We Want Justice. We’re still waiting for justice. We’re also waiting for you. Thousands of us will be in front of the Justice Department this Saturday whether you say something or not. The train is leaving the station. It’s a train upon which you’ve already traveled. All we want is for you to get back on board.

John Nichols reports on the burgeoning movement in Florida to repeal the Stand Your Ground law.